BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Thursday, June 22, 2023

“Identity” (post 1) by Milan Kundera: His “inner self” kept silent


“When he wondered: what should I choose for my whole life’s work? His inner self would fall into the most uncomfortable silence. When finally he decided on medicine, he was responding not to some secret predilection but rather to an altruistic idealism…he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? (1, pp. 67-68).


Comment: Since “inner self” is not a standard term in psychology or psychiatry, I will infer what the author means from the way he uses it. If it is sometimes silent, but not always, it would seem to be a personified voice in the person’s head that may or may not choose to say what the person truly likes or wants. In other words, it is a conscious, behind-the-scenes, core alternate personality, whose thoughts cannot be read by the person’s regular personality, but whose opinions could be communicated to the regular personality as a voice in the person’s head.


Since the character hasn’t been labeled as having multiple personality, the reticent voice in his head may reflect the author’s multiple personality trait.


1. Milan Kundera. Identity (a novel). Translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York, HarperPerennial, 1997/1999.


Search “Kundera” in this blog for past posts on this author. 

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